Knott, a professor at Indiana University, uses her own path to motherhood, which includes a miscarriage and two successful pregnancies, as the scaffolding for her engaging and pleasingly radical “unconventional history” of this subject.

"To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.”